Tag: container-networking

In the world of containers, Kubernetes has become the community standard for container orchestration and management. But there are some basic elements surrounding networking that need to be considered as applications are built to ensure that full multi-cloud capabilities can be leveraged.

The Basics of Kubernetes Networking: Pods

The basic unit of management inside Kubernetes is not a container—It is called a pod. A pod is simply one or more containers that are deployed as a unit. Often, they are a single functional endpoint used as part of a service offering.

Two examples of valid pods are:

Database pod—a single MySQL container

Web pod—an instance of Python in one container and Redis in a second container

Useful things to know about pods:

They share resources—including the network stack and namespace.

A pod is assigned a single IP which clients connect to.

A pod configuration defines any public ports and what container hosts the port.

All containers within a pod can interact over any port over the network. (They are all referenced as localhost, so be sure that all the services in the pod have unique ports.)

Kubernetes Services

A Kubernetes service is where multiple identical pods are managed behind a load balancer. Clients connect to the IP of the load balancer instead of the individual IPs of each pod. Defining your application as a service allows Kubernetes to scale the number of pods based on the rules defined, and available resources.

Defining an application as part of a service is the only way to make it available to clients outside of the Kubernetes infrastructure. Even if you never scale past one node, services is the avenue to have an external IP address assigned.

On Friday we released version 1.5 of the Rancher container management platform. The enhancements in this release are designed to help ensure enterprise- as well as production-readiness. Additional webhooks improve Rancher extensibility and enable you to optimize overall infrastructure utilization. New API, networking and container scheduling policies provide fine-grained control of the container environment. Additional enhancements include metadata performance improvements and conditional logic support for catalog templates. Read more